Category Archives: News

Update on prism glasses projects

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Dan wearing Hamblin Prism glasses

Autumn has arrived and with it a flurry of activity on our prism glasses project. We’ve submitted a research paper describing the results of our prism glasses survey which combined the data from our original research (see HERE for a summary) with some new data collected by Alexis as part of the Dunhill Medical Trust study. We are hopeful for some kind reviews! We’ve also been progressing with our PPIE work, and the PSP Association were kind enough to invite Dan to thier PRIM group meeting. The meeting produced some really interesting insights, and we’ll be taking those on board as we revise our research plan. Something else that became very clear from both our research paper and meetings with patients and carers is that there is very little information out there about which prism glasses might be useful for PSP, so we’ve added a bit more information about different prism types to our website. To get a more direct experience, Dan ordered some prism glasses and has been wearing around the house to see how they feel (he reports it makes it very hard to take a good selfie…). We’ve also had meetings with Prof Chrystalina Antonaides (Oxford) and Dr Lisa Alcock (Newcastle) to take the first steps towards a collaborative project looking at whether prism glasses might help with mobility and we are hoping to arrange a second survey study of prism glasses with the PSP Association.

Progress also continues with the Dunhill Medical Trust project on attention and memory in PSP.  Alexis is contining to recruit people for his age matched control group, and presented a poster showing that people with PSP have a profound deficit of visual search at Neuro 2024 in Toronto (although he nearly didn’t make it after his flight got cancelled at the last minute!).  Dan will present these results at the upcoming meeting of the British Neuropsychological Society in London later in November.

 

Summer Project Update

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Easter term has seen Alexis making excellent progress with the PSP project. We are now well on course to hit our target of 27 people in the PSP group and can turn our thoughts to recruiting some age matched controls. Dan also presented some preliminary data from the visual search task at the PSP Association Research Information Day on 23rd of May.  His talk and many other fascinating presentations can be found on the PSPA webpage: Research Information Events – PSPA (pspassociation.org.uk). We also submitted an application to the Ulverscroft Foundation for a PhD project that (if we’re successful) will follow up our pilot project that explored the experiences of people with PSP when using prism glasses.

There was some good news for Soazig, who had a paper on the effect of labelling on aesthetic appreciation and gaze behaviour accepted in a special issue of Journal of Vision. It was also exciting to start a new project with Prof Andy Beresford from MLAC and the Bowes Museum which uses mobile eye tracking to help evaluate visitors’ experiences of the 2nd floor galleries of the Museum. Two of our psych graduates (Lucy Edgar and Catherine Guo) have temporarily joined us to run the project, which will take place over the next month and will be complemented by a lab-based study run by Flora Loh.

Lucy, Catherine, Soazig & Andy at the Bowes Museum ready to begin the eye-tracking study

Xueqing has completed the first experiments of her PhD project exploring perceptual expertise in table-tennis players. As predicited, experts were better at predicting the landing position of a table-tennis shot, particularly at early occlusion intervals. However, this advantage depends on the stroke type, and, rather surprisingly,  experts were much slower at responding than novice players. Having aced her progression viva, Xueqing is now heading off to China to recruit a large sample of elite table-tennis players to follow this finding up in a larger sample.

We are now looking forward to summer conference season. Xueqing has already presented her first experiment at the RIO group meeting in Liverpool and Dan and Soazig will be going to the Experimental Psychology Society meeting in York. Dan will present some new data on how presaccadic attention and memory based attention interact during actions, and Soazig will describe the preliminary findings of a TMS study that examines the effect of FEF neurostimulation on premotor attention shifts. Later in the summer Soazig will present at the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) and European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) in Aberdeen. Alexis will also be at ECVP, having been invited to contribute to a symposium on “Perception, Cognition and Action in Neuropsychological Patients: Bridging Science and Practice” organised by Jutta Billino & Jennifer Randerath. It is going to be a busy summer!

Autumn Update: FESN 2023, new paper published

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It has been a busy summer for the MotorBias project with lots of progress on several projects. Alexis’ main focus has been the Dunhill Medical Trust project on Attention and Memory in PSP and Parkinsons’ disease, which reached a notable milestone when we reached our recruitment target of 27 for the Parkinsons group. This excellent achievement is thanks due to the fantastic efforts of Susan Wilson at Sunderland Royal and Bryony Storey at Gateshead who have provided us with a steady stream of willing volunteers, and of course the participants themselves whose time and effort we are very grateful for!  Dan has also been busy with the PSP project, running very some very informative PPI sessions with Susan at Sunderland Royal to get feedback on the potential for a project exploring prism use in PSP.

Another highlight of the summer  was the Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies 2023, where we were  fortunate to be joined by Prof Chrystalina Antonaides and Dr Luca Wollenberg in the city of Thessalonki  for a symposium on “Visual cognition and oculomotor control in neurodegenerative disease” organized by Dan and Thomas.  Alexis presented a preliminary analysis of the visual search tasks, reporting that people with PSP find visual searh significantly more challenging than people with Parkinsons’ disease. Chrystalina outlined her recent advances in using measures of oculomotor control to track progression of Parkinson’s disease and Luca who explained his exciting research showing decoupling of attention and saccades after training. Although unfortunately Prof Trevor Crawford wasn’t able to join as planned, the symposium produced lively discussion in the session and at the symposium dinner afterwards. We’re very hopeful that some the seeds of ideas planted over dinner and well watered with Greek beer will grow into future collaborations!

Overall the conference was very good with some some thought provoking keynotes. Alfredo Spagna gave a particularly compelling talk arguing against a functional role for V1 in mental imagery. Unfortunately the poster sessions were a great disappointment. Posters were electronic, but with only three display screens it was impossible to browse the posters at leisure, which is one of the great pleasures of a conference. It also severely limited the time Dan had to present the results of the VSWM and social cognition tasks, which was very frustrating. You can see the poster at the bottom of this page.

Other notable events during the summer included Siobhan getting a new job with Dr Robert Hardwick in Leuven, Belgium, a new publication from in PLOSONE in which Dan demonstrated the existence of a presaccadic perceptual impairment at the post-saccadic location of the blindspot (Smith Beierholm & Avery 2023), Shuzhe completing her masters project looking at the effect of varying cue spatial frequency on the temporal profile of exogenous attention, and Soazig submitting a paper on eye-movements and aesthetic appreciation to JoV. With the start of term imminent we’re looking forward to welcoming a our new cohort of UG and masters students and getting on with more exciting projects.

Siobhan submits her PhD!

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Today was a momentous day as Siobhan submitted her PhD thesis, “Examining the representation of spatial short term memories through the lens of resource allocation theory”.  The main take-home is that spatial short-term memory is best characterised as a flexible resource that is constrained by the amount of cortical space available, as predicted by the cortical maps hypothesis of Franconeri et al., (2013). We’re all very proud of Siobhan, especially as her PhD was profoundly disrupted by the pandemic, and it’s a real testament to her resilience and ability that 2 chapers have already been published (McAteer et al., 2023 in JoV and McAteer et al., 2023 in AP&P) with 2 more under review.  It has been a real pleasure to have Siobhan in the lab and we’ve all learned a lot, especially about mixture modelling :-).  Siobhan will be leaving us in August to take a postdoc position at Louvain University for the next step in what we’re sure will be a brilliant career. Well done and good luck Siobhan!

McAteer, Siobhan M. and McGregor, Anthony and Smith, Daniel T. (2023) ‘Oculomotor rehearsal in visuospatial working memory.’, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 85 (1). pp. 261-275.

McAteer, Siobhan M. and Ablott, Emma and McGregor, Anthony and Smith, Daniel T. (2023) ‘Dynamic resource allocation in spatial working memory during full and partial report tasks.’, Journal of Vision, 23 (2). p. 10.

 

PPI funds secured for development work on the Prism glasses project

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One project that has been simmering along is our idea for exploring of the clinical benefit of prism glasses. The project idea arose from discussions with colleagues about the use of prism glasses by people who have problems with vision and  attention following brain injury (e.g. hemispatial neglect). There is a well developed literature about how prism use in these groups, and we were really surprised that there was no similar literature for people with PSP.  We have some preliminary data from a survey about how and why people with PSP use prism glasses (see User Perspectives on the Efficacy of Prism Therapy for PSP), but these items may not necessarily reflect the activities that are important to people with PSP and we need more qualitative feedback on what is important to the users. Following some very helpful discussion with the NHS Research Design Service we were awarded for £250 to fund some patient-public involvement work to help guide the development of this project. The grant will help us get a feel for the kinds of questions we should be asking and what activites are important to people with PSP  (e.g. do they prefer to train to use prisms for reading or for mobility?), which will influence the design of future research projects. This latter question is also important because we already know from our work on rehabilitation of heminaopia that training needs to be task specific (e.g. Aimola et al., 2014; Lane et al., 2010), so it will be useful to understand which tasks shuold be prioritised for training. We’re planning to run the activities in May/June with Dr Uma Nath in Sunderland and the RDS, and in the longer term this PPI work will form the basis for a grant application to systematically evaluate study the efficacy of prism glasses as a treatment for PSP.

Aimola, Lina and Lane, Alison R. and Smith, Daniel T. and Kerkhoff, Georg and Ford, Gary A. and Schenk, Thomas (2014) ‘Efficacy and feasibility of home-based training for individuals with homonymous visual field defects.’, Neurorehabilitation and neural repair., 28 (3). pp. 207-218.

Lane, A.R. and Smith, D.T. and Ellison, A. and Schenk, T. (2010) ‘Visual exploration training is no better than attention training for treating hemianopia.’, Brain., 133 (6). pp. 1717-1728.